


and grief would end them

by Invulpis



Category: K-pop, 크나큰 | KNK (Band)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Demons, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Horror, Hurt/Comfort, Mixnine Era, Monsters, One Shot, Panic Attacks, Seungjun-centric, Supernatural Elements, Violence, Yogoe, implied ot5, momentary descriptions of gore, no canon character deaths, playing fast and loose with canon, sorry seungjun, sweet and supportive knk boys though
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-08
Updated: 2018-01-08
Packaged: 2019-03-02 09:10:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,758
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13315020
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Invulpis/pseuds/Invulpis
Summary: “It’s just grief.” They would say. “It’ll pass.” They’d assure. So that’s what Seungjun would call It. Her. Grief. He had never seen Grief fully or clearly but what he had seen was enough. If you had asked him at the time he would have said Grief is tall, as tall as a staircase. As a tree. Sometimes as tall as a house. And Grief was thin like a tree too. Thin like someone starving, someone sick, someone dying. Seungjun would have said that Grief has no eyes, no hair, and her face was loose and stretched, like She couldn’t hold it together. Like She was rotting away.Seungjun has been followed by a demon who tears people apart since he was ten.





	and grief would end them

**Author's Note:**

> my first try at a horror piece  
> heavily inspired by "The Birch"

  
His grandmother was a strange sort in many ways. She loved him dearly throughout his childhood, attending functions and requesting photos like any grandma would. Seungjun hadn’t been exaggerating though, when he said she had him eat earthworms during those interviews. Disgusting, vile and to this day leaving a nauseating feeling in his stomach at the sight of them; A familiar taste of dirt and rot in his mouth. She had never said it was to help him grow tall though. No, the word she used was strong.  
  
When Seungjun turned ten he met his grandmother, frail and gaunt in her bed, for the last time. His mother and father remained outside the room for the moment, distracting his little brother while consoling his aunt, wasting precious time and leaving him to face this reality alone. He bravely tried to hold back tears as she beckoned him close to her side and took his hands in her own.  
  
“Do not be scared for me boy.” She said, stern and weak and loving all the same. Seungjun wanted to say he wasn’t scared, he was sad. He would miss her. Wanted to ask, plead, if she would please stay? He didn’t understand why she had to leave now. He didn’t want to. He would miss her so much. But she continued on. Eyes somber and serious with a message to convey.  
  
“Yogoe…” She paused, harsh coughs stealing her breath, and Seungjun winced as his grandma overcame it and pushed on.

“She will take me safely, and then she will come back to watch over you.”  
  
Seungjun’s small hands shook in hers as she pressed a small blackened leaf into his palm. He could feel it crumble into ash against his skin. He didn’t know what his grandmother had been talking about at the time. He just didn’t want her to leave. So he sobbed into her shoulder while her long, wiry fingers stroked through his hair, not quite soothing enough. He left that day with a charcoal-like stain from the leaf that wouldn’t wash away for weeks to come, no matter how much his skin tore as he desperately tried to rub it away.  


.

  
Seungjun is 11 when he knows it’s real. His life had been off balance since his grandmother’s passing. The strain of his building nightmares, hallucinations and paranoid behavior had him missing large gaps of school while his parents sought professional after professional to get him help.  
  
“It’s just grief.” They would say. “It’ll pass.” They’d assure. Words eagerly accepted by worried parents just wanting their first son to be okay.  
  
So that’s what Seungjun would call It. Her. Grief. He had never seen Grief fully or clearly but what he had seen was enough. If you had asked him at the time he would have said Grief is tall, as tall as a staircase. As a tree. Sometimes as tall as their house. And Grief was thin like a tree too. Thin like someone starving, someone sick, someone dying. Like his grandma had been that last day. Seungjun would have said that Grief has no eyes, no hair, and her face was loose and stretched, like she couldn’t hold it together. Like she was rotting away.  
  
He hadn’t yet seen Grief clearly, but what he had seen was enough. In passing reflections, outside his bedroom window, waiting beside his parents as he left yet another appointment. The first few times resulted in panic attacks and sleepless nights. Days of helplessness to the monster no one else could see. Then it got better. Grief never touched him or moved too close, and as long as he didn’t look at her she wasn’t real, and that helped. She wasn’t real yet.  
  
It changed one evening when on his way home from the corner market a block down the street with some bean paste for his mom, Seungjun was pushed into a bus stop enclosure by another kid. This kid was loud, and full of pride and cruelty and violence. Seungjun was an easy target. The weird kid who saw things and missed too much school. People talked. Seungjun tried his best to slip away and just make it the rest of the way home but he wasn’t big or strong yet. Just weak and scared. And alone.  
  
He was hit. He was smacked and kicked until he fell to the ground where he was kicked again. Tears in his eyes and his voice weak as he pleaded for the boy to stop, for it to stop. Please. A sharp kick to his skull took away his sight for a moment and made his ears ring and lungs seize. For a second all he knew was pain, and after a moment it faded enough to bring back the sounds of the empty street and that cruel, bully of a child cackling.  
  
But then the cackles stopped with a choke.  
  
When Seungjun opened his eyes the boy was no longer standing over him. It was. She was. His vision still fuzzy but he could feel the damp cold, heavy in the air, and smell the rot. The earthworms. Feel his skin buzzing. Feel the pain.  
  
He could see a wiggling, jerking blob above him too. In her hands. Held up. The kid. He couldn’t have been older than 13.  
  
Seungjun could hear so clearly when She pulled the bully’s esophagus up through his mouth.  
  
He returned home with a concussion and enough bruises to make his body scream when he collapsed on the bathroom floor, puking and shaking. His mother didn’t get a word out of him about what happened that night. As frightened and concerned as she was, his father consoled her with promises to take him to the hospital first thing the next morning, that going out this late wouldn’t do him any good. That was fine. They would have had to drag him out the door screeching if they had tried to make him leave.

  
The next morning a news story detailed the gruesome remains found down the street from their home. The police wouldn’t release any true details but there were rumors that it was a middle schooler, and that his intestines had been found splattered on a nearby wall. Seungjun sat numbly, and wondered if they had found the bully’s eyes too. He knew they were no longer attached.  
  
When the hospital reported his proximity to the area and injuries to the authorities they didn’t want to follow up. There was no way this animalistic murder could possibly be linked to a troubled kid who got roughed up. And at this rate, questioning a child would get out to the press in no time, and they’d likely be clued in to the nature of their victim before the chief was ready to address it. He was forgotten.  
  
His family moved away shortly after, unable and unwilling to stay in such a violent and dangerous neighborhood. And they forgot.  
  
Seungjun would grow. Grow to be bigger, taller, wiser, and less afraid. He would no longer flinch when he saw It’s long rotting arm over the banister of the stairs, or the stiff coarse texture of its flesh rustling in the wind outside his window. He would feel safe.  
  
But over the years people would disappear. A few were like her first victim, people who had wanted to do him harm. Who disapproved of his soft maturing face and wanted to rough some masculinity into his bones. Some were people who just wanted him to suffer. Who wouldn’t touch him with their hands but would speak cruelly to tear him down. Ones without remorse. One day it was a vagrant who he had bumped shoulders with on his way home that had gotten a bit aggressive in retaliation to the imagined slight. Just a man having a bad day, who bumped into the wrong person.  
  
Seungjun sprinted home when he smelled the decay, knowing what was to follow it.  
  
He didn’t have to witness Her actions firsthand again for over a decade, but he would hear and he would know. When his school’s superintendent was found maimed and scattered across the side of a cliff. Or when the local, leering bus driver was suddenly replaced preceding short coverage of a local violent homicide involving multiple irregular stab wounds.  
  
He would sometimes see them too. See their faces in place of hers on her stretched corpse of a body. Victims of his sensitivity, his weakness, his demons. Seungjun didn’t know if they were real too.  
  
So he grew up kind. As kind, charming, and non confrontational as one could be. Passive and willing to do anything to avoid discourse. Conflict. Avoiding the possibility of anyone disliking him too much. Whatever he could do to prevent Her from taking someone else who had the misfortune to meet him. And he got good at it. So good he got confident. So confident he became an idol. 

.

The first time KNK had a real argument Seungjun had his first panic attack in years. They were still trainees but he could easily say he adored his hopefully future group mates. So when voices rose and grew tense Seungjun’s heart took off and all he could think of was _no._ When his head was clear and breathing calmed again the room was quiet. Inseong and Heejun were by his side with worried eyes and when he weezed out an apology they were confused. The two listened thoughtfully as he explained his ‘anxiety’ with conflict, and thoughtful as they promised they’d work on keeping it calmer. So gracious.

When Seungjun noticed Youjin and Jihun had left the room his panic veered sharply back to the surface again. She had taken them. They were gone and it was his fault. It would all be ruined they’d be dead- but no. There was no smell of rot and death and earth, just sweat and heat. Inseong explained that the two had just stepped outside to settle things, and he could relax again.

They had more arguments that put him on edge surely. It was unavoidable in a group of young men who are tired and afraid and ambitious and desperate to debut. But Seungjun had never seen Her near them. He liked to think it was because they could never harbor ill will towards him, no matter how tense and angry they were. They were safe from Her. Safe from him.

Not everyone was.

.

  
The atmosphere of the practice room is tense with this new revelation and the hairs on the back of Seungjun’s neck stand up as a younger contestant tries to negotiate for parts he cannot handle in a plea for more screen time. Parts assigned to Seungjun. He does his best to smooth things along, easily offering one of his killing shots to appease the younger boy. It’s a bit disappointing but it’s fine. He’s fine. He’s not hurt by this.

  
But then the kid continues, also wanting to share his opener and Seungjun’s voice gets dry and he feels unsure for a split second before he realizes that yes, he’s willing to give that up too. He goes to say so when another contestant chimes in, defending his placement in the song and dragging out the conflict. he feels a chill in his limbs and as his eyes dart to the corners of the room he nearly jolts at the split second appearance of a shadow, looming sickly and tall behind them all through the reflection of the practice mirrors.

Only a brief glance, out the corner of his eye, but it’s enough to leave his ears ringing and heart racing, eyes on the ground, too aware of the the cameras and too aware of his dread. By the time he’s breathing regularly and can tune back into the conversation everything has been worked out, and he breathes deeply.

  
.

 

It was an easy night out. They sat and talked about everything from the moon to the stars. Where they were in life and were they were going. Seungjun hadn’t even seen her once. And they drank. They drank and they drank until Seungjun let himself go and ranted, his soft easiness contorting into something ugly and frustrated. Ranted and raved and whined about all the stresses and struggles that came with idol life. He complained until he could no more, and at the end of it he had felt lighter. More at ease.

  
He hadn’t noticed how quiet Lee had gone during his raving, how his mood had changed, posture stiffened. Alcohol buzzing in his mind he just felt free and right. He was okay and everything would be alright. It didn’t all come crashing down until they had left the grill and made their way back up town. When Lee stopped him with a fist in his collar, asking him who the hell he thought he was, complaining like that to him, when he at least debuted.  
  
The violence in his old friends eyes was frightening and sobering. Seungjun could see the hurt and despair of someone whose dreams had been crushed, and the rage. Oh the rage. Lee backed him up into the wall with that first in his collar, body tight, no trace of the alcohol that should’ve been dampening his movements, and Seungjun felt dread.  
  
“No. Please.”  
  
Lee’s head cocked to the side and he jerked Seungjun forward only to shove him against the harsh brick again, a twisted smile on his face.  
  
As if Seungjun was talking to him.  
  
“You think you can just waltz around like you’re some big shot now with all these problems I couldn’t possibly understand huh?”

  
Please no please please just stop don't do this please-  
  
“You don’t have any clue how fucking grateful I’d be if I was in your position?! If I had all those struggles, I-I would take them tenfold to be able to do what you do! And you what?! Say it’s hard?”  
  
“Please, please.”  
  
The wall against his back wasn’t a bus shelter, and he wasn’t pleading with an anonymous bully. He wasn’t even pleading with his attacker. He wanted to say something else. To diffuse the situation. To save his friend. But his throat was tight and his limbs shook and as his panic overtook him he barely registers as he’s pulled off the wall again. Then slammed, head knocking hard against the bricks. And again. And again.  
  
When Seungjun comes too Lee Hwan is gone and he is slumped against the cold wall of an apothecary with a fierce pounding in his head. Stiffness in his neck and shoulders. But he is not alone. She is there. Yogoe, he remembers his grandmother called her. His grief.  
  
She stands directly before him. The aura of her presence surrounding him and for once not triggering revulsion in his gut. He looks up at her, still dizzy, and takes in her pale, vein, moss and mold covered flesh, the gauntness of her skeletal structure pressing up beneath Her skin. She’s wearing no ones face but her own, slack-jawed, carved out, ghoulish and still where she seems to look down to him without eyes.  
  
The familiar dampness surrounds him like a dense forest after a rain. The scent of raw decay and dirt and stillness a familiar backdrop to her towering form. A hand in his hair, like rotten twigs on his scalp, moving in a jilted mimicry of how his grandmother would so long ago to soothe him. Safe and sick.  
  
Seungjun feels cold. Feels cold and heavy without the knowledge of if Lee Hwan had simply left on his own terms, or if he had become the first victim of his foolish relapse into normality. He feels cold with the understanding that he doesn’t care. Wherever he was, it was of no consequence to him now. It’s over.  
  
The fingers retreat along with the presence that is replaced with a cool gust of wind that wracks his frame. He is alone again. He’s numb. Seungjun thinks of going home. Returning to his dorm and laying in his warm bed. Or maybe sliding into Youjin’s, or Jihun’s. One of them surely wouldn’t kick him out. He thinks of his members’ warm smiles and ignorant acceptance of his “quirks”. Of how they let him feel safe for them. Shoos away the thought that he’d felt the same way about his old trainee friend not hours before.  
  
Picking himself up off the abandoned street, Seungjun stumbles home and forgets.

**Author's Note:**

> this was my first go at a fic like this, so if you made it to the end please drop me a line to let me know how i did! 
> 
> thank you for reading~


End file.
